Modern (“smart”) mobile devices have become pervasive. At the time of this writing, mobile phones and tablets have come to occupy a large part of peoples' daily lives. iPhones, iPads, Google Nexus devices, Samsung's Galaxy line of products, Motorola's Android phones, etc. are everywhere and more mobile devices are making their way into the market such as so-called “smart-watches”. In many cases these devices have in fact replaced traditional desktops (i.e. Personal Computers (PCs)) as the predominant computing devices of the day.
Yet, the majority of mobile devices on the market suffer from a number of major drawbacks. Some of those drawbacks are a problem to the mobile device's direct user, while others are a problem to the companies and organizations, and more specifically the Information Technology (IT) departments which manage the infrastructure of said companies and organizations, where the user brings his device to or uses his device for work (i.e. the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend.)
First and foremost, one of the major drawbacks of mobile devices to users and the companies and/or organizations they may belong to is that said mobile devices represent a technological shift that breaks with existing usage paradigms, habits and corresponding investments and expenditures. Namely, mobile devices don't run traditional desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows™ and have varying degrees of difficulty of being connected with and making use of the capabilities provided by, to or for such desktop operating systems (OSes). As such, much of the functionality provided to both users and the organizations they belong to on desktop systems isn't available and/or can't be made available or readily possible on current mobile devices, or can only be made available with severe limitations.
Among many other issues, for example, it's increasingly common wisdom that mobile devices are great for consuming content, media and data but not so great for creating content, media and data, a task to which desktops have been historically well-adapted. This is partly due to the hardware limitations of mobile devices, who are primarily touch-based or motion-based, but is also reflected in the user-interfaces built for such devices which assume that the only pointing device available is one that has very limited precision: human fingers touching the screen or waving at the device using gestures. Desktops on the other hand typically have hardware more adapted for high volumes of input and interfaces that assume a fairly precise pointing device: the desktop mouse.
Another effect of the technological shift to touch-based devices is the disappearance of the keyboard as the primary input device. While some early smartphones came equipped with real physical keyboards, fewer and fewer devices actually sport them, the device vendors assuming that the market is no longer asking for such a feature. Some users, however, continue to look for this kind of input and resort to purchasing add-on keyboards for their mobile devices. In the case of phones, such keyboards can be made to snap onto the bodies of the mobile phone and slide out when needed, the addition doubling as a protective casing for the phone. In the case of tablets, such keyboards can be made to be encased into or attached to the clamshell/folded sleeves used to protect and carry the tablet.
Another example where mobile devices cause breakage with traditional desktops is in the software Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The two predominant mobile OSes at the time of this writing, namely iOS™ and Android™, make no effort whatsoever to provide backward compatibility to the plethora of software that was developed for traditional desktops OSes such as the widely-used Windows™ OS or niche OSes such as Linux™ or Mac™ OS. Hence, there's typically no way to use traditional desktop applications on mobile devices without using some form of remote desktop functionality where said application is running remotely on a desktop, whether it be a real, physical one or a virtual machine.
Even a remote desktop capability brings with it its own set of issues. Primarily, it assumes the availability of a reliable and fast-enough data connection for the mobile device. While wireless networks are increasingly available, they aren't always available and they can sometimes suffer outages. And in the case of data access provided by mobile network operators through their mobile networks, such access can be very expensive. Also, most remote desktop capabilities assume the user is at least somewhat technically-savvy enough to be able to configure network addresses and deal with protocol-specific issues in order to make good use of his remote desktop. Either way, the user remains physically distant from the actual desktop system and can't readily connect any peripherals to the remote desktop. Instead, he has to make do with the limited functionality made available to him remotely.
One significant issue with the use of user-supplied mobile devices in a corporate environments is security. Indeed, IT departments face an uphill battle in ensuring the mobile devices brought to work by their users don't actually compromise the security of the existing infrastructure. This generally is a challenge because the mobile device OSes weren't designed with strong data segmentation in mind. Hence, there is always the potential for private, confidential and proprietary information to leak by way of the user's use of malicious or ill-conceived software that's running on his or her device. Various products have been put forth to solve this problem on mobile devices obviously. However, this is a problem that had known, well-accepted and well understood solutions in the day where organizations provided their users with desktop-based systems that had been properly configured and/or prepared by the IT department. Such configuration and preparation is practically impossible in the world of modern mobile devices. This is due in part to the fact that contrary to the desktop world where users can install their own OSes from scratch on laptops and workstations, mobile OSes come “burned in” from factory on mobile devices. Also, contrary to the desktop world where OS and core OS component updates are frequent, mobile device vendors have little to no incentive to update the system software running on their devices since their incentive is to sell new devices. Security, especially from the corporate perspective, remains therefore largely an unsolved issue with mobile devices.
Even without the corporate and security aspects, there are several downsides with the mobile devices in the mainstream market. First, as mentioned earlier, users remain locked by their vendors to a specific operating system software version that offers little to no upgrade path. In essence, the vendors' incentive is to sell newer devices, not upgrade old ones. Second, the level of control users have on their devices is fairly limited. In fact, most vendors, or the network operators selling the devices to a user, lock said devices down for a variety of reasons, thereby severely limiting the user's ability to truly control or modify the actions of the software running on his device. Therefore, if the user wants to get additional functionality, its assumed he'll have to purchase a brand new device.
Another issue faced by some users is the disappearance of ultra-portable desktop-grade computers. Whereas a few years ago, models such as the OQO™ or the Sony's™ ultra-portable Micro-PCs were available, these have been largely sidelined given the emergence of powerful mobile devices. Yet, some users still have a need for such PC-like devices on the go.
Separately from the issues of modern mobile devices. Users have other needs which remain unsolved by current offerings, either in software or hardware. Two specific ones of interest are password management and portable storage.
With regards to password management, users increasingly have to remember a larger and larger number of passwords for accessing a variety of different services and offerings. There are some password management apps on mobile devices. However, such apps assume that the OS that's running on the device is secure, which in and of itself is a flawed assumption given that, as mentioned above, most mobile devices' OSes are never updated. Hence, there's always the potential for passwords to be compromised if the data is stored on a mobile device. Some people resort to actually writing their passwords on bits of paper that they keep in their wallets. Obviously this has a number of drawbacks. If nothing else, theft or loss of the wallet with the clear-text passwords would result in an immediate threat to the security of the services and/or systems protected by said passwords.
With regards to portable storage, most mobile devices have a limited amount of storage. In addition, the storage used in such devices is solid-state storage such as embedded Multi-Media Card (eMMC) chips, Secure Digital (SD) cards and/or NOR or NAND flash that isn't geared for intensive usage. All such devices have a limited number of erase cycles and, therefore, writing to such devices must be limited in order to avoid wearing the storage prematurely, thereby rendering it inoperable. For this, and many of the reasons above, users must continue to carry a conventional laptop to use as their main work environment.
There is therefore a need for providing desktop functionality to mobile device users.
There is therefore also a need to provide keyboards to mobile devices.
There is thus a need to provide means for running unmodified desktop applications in conjunction with mobile devices.
There is therefore a need to provide desktop functionality to mobile devices that doesn't require access to large-scale mobile or wireless networks. There is thus also the need to make such access as easy as possible.
There is therefore additionally a need for providing a desktop-like environment for mobile devices that can be configured, customized and/or secured by the IT department which manages the infrastructure belonging to the organization for which the user works.
There is thus also a need to provide device-agnostic and software-version-agnostic functionality which the user can upgrade and maintain separately from his mobile device.
There is therefore further a need to provide PC-like functionality in an ultra-portable form-factor.
There is thus additionally a need to provide means for users to store, manage and access their passwords securely.
There is thus further a need for providing users with a means for having access to and the ability to process large amounts of information that doesn't necessarily depend on the use of solid-state storage.